Charles Murray and Cultural Gentrification

Charles Murray has called for wealthier Americans to help bridge the cultural chasm between themselves and citizens further down the class ladder by moving out of their enclaves and into less exclusive areas. There’s a name for at least some of this: gentrification.

Gentrification is what happens when wealthier people buy up property in blighted or at least scruffy parts of a city, and renovate the run-down housing. It’s also called “urban pioneering” — the idea that one is staking a claim to savage territory, and civilizing it by one’s presence. “Gentrification” is, to many people, a dirty word, because it displaces very poor people from those neighborhoods. I don’t think it’s a dirty word, frankly — but then again, I was a second-wave gentrifier once.

The neighborhood where we bought our house had been a drug-gang war zone in the 1970s and 1980s. Then, in the 1990s, the gentrifiers showed up. They loved those architecturally significant old houses, and saw value there. They took big risks to buy those properties up, even though they came cheap. Eventually the neighborhood started slowly getting better. By the time we arrived, it was a good place to live, though close enough to the danger zone that some nights you could hear gunshots in the near distance. As far as I knew, a Hispanic couple, both retirees, was the only couple from our block from the old days. They talked about how it was too dangerous to sit on your front porch at night back then. They were clearly happy that the neighborhood had turned around.

But here’s the thing. With the coming of the middle-class gentrifiers, their old neighbors — mostly working-class Hispanics like them, I believe — moved out. Property values went up — but that meant they had to pay higher property taxes. Because the gentrifiers moved there out of love for the historic quality of those old houses, they pushed to have the neighborhood declared an official Historic District. When this happened, it radically limited the freedom of homeowners to do what they wanted with their property. I remember our Hispanic neighbors running afoul of the city for some minor code violation thing in this regard. Eventually they decided they were going to try to sell their house and leave. I think they had several reasons for doing this, some having to do with grandchildren, but I’m fairly certain that they just got tired of living among people like, well, us. To be clear, there was no discord between them and the other neighbors. We got along fine. But I could see how they might have felt like for all the good that came to their neighborhood with gentrification, they also lost it.

Again, I don’t think gentrification is a bad thing, in principle, for reasons mentioned in this article. The reason I bring it up here, even though I don’t think Murray is talking only about gentrification, is because I think the same dynamic that we see with gentrification should make one skeptical of Murray’s idea that having members of various social and economic classes living together is going to bridge the cultural chasm. As long as people are free to buy and sell property as they wish, and there are laws forbidding covenants that keep classes of people from buying property in a particular place — two factors that we can all agree are good things — then people will try to live around people like themselves. This is normal human behavior. That means too that they will not want people too unlike themselves living around them. This is normal human behavior also.

Let’s say that a few SWPL hipsters with cash start buying up housing in a “vibrant” neighborhood, because they want to live around working-class people. Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that these SWPLs are the children of the people in Belmont, the prosperous town Murray mentions in his book, “Coming Apart.” They get the idea that it’s cool to live in Fishtown, the working-class town also in his book, because they want the “authentic” experience, and they hate the stuffiness of Mom and Dad’s boring rich suburb. For starters, how likely do you think the people of Fishtown are to take to these outsiders moving in? Second, how likely do you think the SWPLs are to stay in Fishtown once they decide to start a family? Do they want their kids to grow up with Fishtown values? [I say that not to privilege Fishtown values over Belmont values, but only to point out that until and unless you’re willing to raise your kids in a place, living there is just tourism.]

Third, let’s say Fishtown gets a reputation among affluent SWPL types, and they start moving in, bidding up the real estate market. Before you know it, the working-class people who live in Fishtown may find they can’t afford to live there. Maybe they don’t want to live there, because the things that made it feel like home are going away. All these strangers are now living here, people with different habits, and different tastes. Maybe the poorest or at least the most disaffected working-class people of Fishtown leave, but others stay, and the neighborhood mix stabilizes. That could happen. But isn’t it possible too that Fishtown would, in time, return to a cultural homogeneity, except now the working class homogeneity has been exchanged for upper class/Bobo homogeneity?

In the end, I think what irritates me about Murray’s suggestion is the idea that working-class white people are eager to welcome upper-class white people to their neighborhoods, so they can learn how to behave from their example. That’s what Murray is calling for. Seriously, he wants upper-class whites to be secure in their bourgeois values, and to move in to working-class areas to educate the natives by setting a good example — and, in turn, gain the benefit of cultural diversity of living around people unlike themselves.

Good luck with that. Leaving the question of housing aside, I’m am pretty sure that the cultural gentrification Murray proposes would not go down well with the people the Murrayite missionaries are supposed to civilize.

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37 Responses to Charles Murray and Cultural Gentrification

Well, to be fair if the rich white people are living there, they are less likely to tolerate a decaying public school building, or the local car wash being drug dealer central. They might actually bring businesses in to the downtown, although they have a bad tendency to start useless boutique businesses rather than ones that might hire people like factories or provide affordable rents. It doesn’t have to be learning from their example: their physical presence might force the very common tendency of the police and others to ignore those downtowns and let bad things perpetuate.

I also think the real reason they may not want to live there is more that they can sell a bad home for a high price to get a better one.

I recall the gentrification of Hoboken NJ – the town had been in the 1800’s – a haven for wealthy New Yorkers during the summer to escape the summer diseases. Block after block of gorgeous brownstones with amazing interiors – marble floors, fireplaces, stained glass windows etc. But hard times came and the city (site of the very first baseball game BTW) was largely a mess except for a few Irish and Italian neighborhoods (think Godfather II). Well – the gentrifiers came in – and they displaced the poor – by fire. Literally – almost every few weeks there would be a fire – later ruled arson – which would drive the poor folk out – and then the gutted or damaged townhouse would be renovated by the landlord into pricey but full of “character” condos for the urban pioneers. I recall one particularly horrific fire where a desperate Mom threw her infant out the window in an attempt to save the child – that child survived – Momma and 6 other children did not.

I am afraid Mr Murray sounds rather naive about how gentrification occurs.

When considering gentrification, it’s worth noting the difference between a thriving lower-income community and a slum. The former generally have acceptable infrastructure and services, higher rates of home ownership and/or well-maintained rentals, and public areas aren’t manifestly unsafe. The latter often have little or no quality infrastructure (schools, transit), exploitative businesses, open crime, and squalor.

Busting up the latter in some fashion is, in general, not bad public policy. However, it is easier said than done–slums generally don’t gentrify. The worst slums tend to be places where an entire municipality is blighted (and the government is often cash-strapped and frequently corrupt), so effective clearance of these sorts of places is rare. What happens instead is the FORMER type of place–low income neighborhoods which are cheap but not dangerous, are the targets of gentrification, and here the lot of the residents is seldom improved. (And as Jane Jacobs noticed, many of the “urban renewal” efforts of the mid 20th century–where low-income neighborhoods were bulldozed and replaced with housing projects–turned thriving-but-poor neighborhoods into ghettos, doing damage that in many cases has yet to be reversed).

I’m not certain the mixing Murray envisions would occur even if the “upper class” could be persuaded to move into “working class” neighborhoods. In fact, much of what Murray suggests has been tried before. Pittsburgh, for instance, has statutes requiring any development taking place on the city’s brownfield sights to be “mixed income.” As far as I can tell, this policy has led to no great cultural exchanges among the residents of these developments. Instead, what appears to happen is that the residents of the developments quickly segregate into their own social/economic enclaves.

“… skeptical of Murray’s idea that having members of various social and economic classes living together is going to bridge the cultural chasm”

This used to work. But only when the rich white people brought good-paying jobs instead of a stately presence. Nobody cares about the stately presence.

Go to a place like Braddock, PA, right outside of Pittsburgh. It used to be one of those places where thousands of salt-of-the-earth mill workers raised their families. All was not well, of course. The air was desperately dirty. So was the water. It maybe wasn’t such a great place to be black or Hispanic. But people who got a chance had some kind of dignity.

The mill is still open. People get paid a lot, but they make more steel with a fraction of the people, and they can all afford to live far away where the air is cleaner. Braddock is a mess.

I believe it’s home to the first Carnegie Library. I guess it’s great that Carnegie built the library and people could read books, but if they had to choose I think they would have taken the jobs over the books.

It’s a little much for me to think that my mere presence would be some kind of cultural elixir if I moved to rural Mississippi. But I bet if I moved to rural Mississippi, trained people to do something then paid them really well to do it, their cultural bearing would take care of itself.

That is, if you are a rich white person, poor people don’t need you to go bowling with them or invite their kids to learn French with yours. They need you to invest in their community and take a more expansive view of “profit maximization.”

My neighbor is an elderly gentleman with kids my age. He was a pigment tycoon, with a factory that made green stuff. It was great that his kids went to school with me and he lived in my neighborhood. They are my friends and I won’t discount that. But his broader contribution was a willingness to keep workers on when the bottom line dictated otherwise. He hired people who couldn’t get jobs in other plants and paid the well. He hired me before I went to college. I was dyed green the whole first semester, but I could pay for my books.

That’s a real clinic in cultural responsibility. I am pretty sure I would have learned less if he would have just lived next door to me and made me want to drive a Lincoln.

It’s hard for the affluent to accept that the person they are laughing at for wearing sweatpants in the grocery store is laughing back at them for dressing up to go to the grocery store. Pick your side, but they generally don’t want to hang out together.

Gentrification often has a racial component, though, and also usually involves upper middle class people moving into very poor neighborhoods. This is more extreme than what Murray is talking about – remember Fishtown is supposed to be a white working class town, not the inner city.

I actually know a poshly educated couple who insisted on a neighborhood that they could comfortably afford on the husband’s journalist salary, which turned out to be basically Fishtown. They send their kids to Catholic school, and just don’t tell people where their degrees are from or how many they have. They get along fine with the neighbors, except the single mom with N kids from N-1 fathers who projects all sorts of judgementalism onto them and therefore hates them. I don’t know whether the other neighbors benefit in any way from their example, or whether their kids benefit from having working class friends. I would be inclined to say that kids are kids and I doubt Fishtown kids are really all that more colorful, but perhaps that is my bubble talking.

People rarely make decisions based upon what is better for other people. They think of their self interest and that of their family. However life is not a zero sum game, so this doesn’t require disadvantage of others, and shared self interest often ensures people find win win outcomes.

So what bugs me about Murray’s suggestion is that he should be smart enough to know that people won’t follow it.

I find all this social angst amusing. Americans know perfectly well what changes working class people into middle class people having done it successfully once before. Union jobs that pay a wage that will allow them to support middle class aspirations. The problem is not without a solution, just without a solution that won”t cost the 1% money or accidentally help the undeserving poor causing moral damage. So Murray and Mr. Dreher scramble for solutions based on the premise that the poor can”t have middle class aspirations and that it is morally damaging for the government to help them. Levin”s ideas from the last post are more of the same. The solution to persistent poverty is to stop helping poor people on the assumption that that poverty is some kind of weird choice morally deficient people make because they won”t starve.

Going with this solution, one thing that could help is decoupling schools from your address and opening up school choice more with vouchers etc. I know it’s different everywhere, but here in the Northeast, where your kids go to public school is tied to your address. So people push up the prices of the houses, seeking the “good” school districts, effectively keeping people of lower incomes out. [P.S. This is not my idea, this is from Elisabeth’s Warren Two Income Trap]

Key thing in most of these gentrified neighborhoods is that the SWPLs (guilty as charged!) are either homeschoolers like Rod or childless or (occasionally) wealthy enough to send their kids to a nice day school.

As mentioned on this blog, Ross Douthat has an interesting take on this: what’s needed isn’t “Murrayite missionaries” but actual missionaries. Religious institutions have been bridging the divide between educated sober prudence and raucous spendthrift intemperance since at least the days when the parish priest was the only literate person in the peasant village. Religious institutions also gave Americans the running tutorial in civic cooperation and (in the Protestant traditions especially) congregational self-governance that Tocqueville so richly documented.

To our woe, though, our religious institutions have become deeply corrupt, as the clerical sex abuse scandals symptomize. Until we repent–especially those of us given to self-righteous preening–the smoke of our sacrifices will stink in the Lord’s nostrils, and He will leave us at the mercy of our spiritual enemies. We do indeed await a new St. Benedict.

I’m trying to imagine the physical geography of Fishtown, and I’m having a really hard time. The large city with a significant working-class white population, where does this thing exist anymore? The closest thing I can imagine is an older, postwar suburb, or maybe an old mill town. Neither of which is likely even to appear on gentrifiers’ radars even if they are down-at-the-heel, which many are, these days. Two-bedroom cape cods and ranches are not lofts or row houses. If you live in one and drink PBR, you would appear to be completely in earnest.

The model applies, I suppose, to Philadelphia, Boston, or Chicago. I can’t really imagine it at all in the south, sunbelt, or midwest outside of Chicagoland. That’s not anything like most of America.

London is no stranger to gentrification. No stranger at all. Chateau Duncan is in a minority-majority area.

But here, poor people don’t generally own their own homes. Maybe it’s different in the States, but homeowners would seem to be a social step or two above most “vibrant” citizens. The main reason people are forced out is due to rent rises. So most of the time, there isn’t much of a choice about moving out when gentrification occurs, because the poor can’t increase their earnings to be able to afford the typical new rents.

That means that there are few people moving out on the basis of cultural concerns during gentrification: it’s entirely financial.

Interestingly, the people who stay behind are the ones on full benefits: because the government pays their rent (that would be, say, a single mother with several children). Alternatively it might be because they live in publicly owned housing (projects) scattered throughout the neighbourhood.

Now, understandably, the Conservative government does not want the taxpayer to foot the bill for private rents so benefits recipients can live in a nice area (it’s not straight forward removing this or Thatcher would have done it). But removing that subsidy will force large numbers of poor to move out of the many, many areas of London with very mixed rich/poor areas to sink estates on the outskirts. In other words, this will create precisely the opposite of what Charles Murray is suggesting: it will massively increase the segregation between rich and poor in the capital.

Now liberal Londoners like me are rather proud that our city is not like Paris with rich on the inside and rabble in the banlieus. I quite understand that taxpayers shouldn’t be supporting private rents, but I don’t want London to self-segregate. I don’t have a good answer.

London (and many other British cities) is a good example of strong rich/poor mixing. I don’t want to lose that, for reasons of “cohesion” that interestingly appear to appeal both to liberals and Charles Murray. Most Tories I know would love London to self-segregate. But to back up Rod’s point, I can’t say that people on the estates next to me are learning that much from my “example”. And I wouldn’t be patronising enough to expect them to.

Always good to see a defense of gentrification, living I believe very near where Rod once did (Flatbush, corner of Ocean Ave and Church Ave). There’s a lot of tremendous value to Coming Apart, but the utterly brazen contradiction of it is that its laced with crude Sean Hannity-style contempt for the very SWPL values that are the natural concomitant of us gentrifiers.

There’s something to be said for this, but my take is more about the political/economic ramifications– namely that gentrifiers bring with them the social capital to get the city government to pay attention to their concerns about crime and infrastructure, and the presence of a stable middle class that isn’t going to leave the instant their kids hit school age is good for the tax base. Higher home values generate more property tax revenue.

Does this have cultural ramifications? I don’t know. Murray’s fantasy past where the working classes and middle classes lived side-by-side was a side-effect of the fact that the first generation of college graduates during the expansion of post-secondary education came from the working class and still lived among their family and peers. A few generations removed from that, combined with economic conditions less conducive to getting people out of poverty if you’re not college educated and a desire to leave “Fishtown” as soon as you have the money to do so is going to create a different dynamic.

I live in an inner-ring burb, in Chicagoland. It’s got a mix of LMC, MC and UMC (upper middle class, though I’m sure it has some Methodists too) folk. It has Latinos, white ethnics (Irish, Italian, & Czech mainly), a small population of Arabs (both Muslims & Christians), and a small population of Blacks.

The school systems (Catholic & public) are the only place people mix. Sure everyone uses the same restaurants and shops, and they’re polite to each other, but not a lot of mixing.

The churches, are not horribly mixed. The Arab Christians worship at the orthodox church by and large, some of the white ethnics, if they go, go to the Catholic church; there’s no mosque in town, so the Muslims go out of town. There are Spanish language Pentecostal churches popping up all over in the next suburb over (a suburb that’s about 90% Latino).

Most people when they come home from work go to their houses and stay there or they go to a school event. The kids play with their friends from school. Many people have no children.

My problem with Murray’s idea is did he not observe the last presidential election? The non-elite seem quite tired of the elite and want nothing to do with them. I really don’t see the non-elite taking kindly to being advised that they should imitate these people they resent and don’t like. And frankly, I can’t blame them. It strikes me as a form of crazy colonialism.

All those questions about what would happen if Belmonters actually started moving into Fishtown? You can actually see what happens because it’s already started to happen and is still happening in the actual Fishtown!

Another interesting point is the racial dynamic – cultural gentrifiers – whether yuppies or hipsters – tend to be white liberals moving into a black Democrat style cities, and despite their common political interests, there is a very serious clash of ideologies when it comes to doing stuff like, you know, actually governing the city.

I find this conversation interesting as I grew up and live in the kind of neighbourhood Murray is describing up here in Canada (Calgary).
Growing up in the 1970s our neighbourhood was a mix of upper middle class oil and gas executives, engineers, doctors, and lawyers, lower middle class people like my parents (mechanic, grocery store cashier), and poor people living in multi-family dwellings. The upper class homes were divided from the lower classes by a busy street but everybody’s kids played hockey, went to Scouts, and school together. The parents also intermingled and became friends. As an example my father coached hockey for years with the CEO of a major engineering company and the owner of regional tile supplier and they all remained friends until the end.
I think the situation worked well for all involved. The upper middle class parents expected high standards from the local public schools (very few private schools here) and from their children and those from my side of the street benefited from their efforts. I also think it raised our parents’ expectations for us as they wanted us to be as successful as our schoolmates and teammates. But it wasn’t just us who benefited. The kids from better part of the neighbourhood could escape from the relatively higher-pressured environment of their parents to the freedom on the other side of the road. A lot of those kids are still my friends 40 years later. And I married a girl from the affluent side of the road as well.
Today, we live in a neighbourhood a mile from my parents and it is set-up very similar to where we grew up except the economic disparity between the two halves is more acute due to the oil and gas boom. On our side of the road houses go for about $350,000. On the other side, they go for up to $3 million. My wife and I do alright, making about $160,000 a year combined. One of the funny things about growing up lower middle class is you quite often achieve your economic goals and rise to the middle class but culturally you don’t progress as fast. You live where you are comfortable and often it looks a lot like where you grew up. What’s bred in the bone is of the flesh, I guess. Any way, we have two daughters and their day-to-day lives are similar to how my wife and I grew up. They go to school with kids from all economic classes and play sports with them. The wealthy kids sleep over at our house and our kids sleep over at their houses. The big difference is the expectations we put on them both academically and culturally are higher than what my parents put on me. My thinking is moving from the lower middle class upwards economically can happen quickly but culturally it likely happens over generations.
The type of community Murray is talking about exists, and could exist anywhere with the right urban planning. But to show results, I think it will take generations

But before you moved in Rod, there was some reverse gentrification that had taken place that brought the neighborhood to the state it was in before the gentrifiers arrived. So the gentrifiers could just be said to be bringing it back to its original state.

Don’t know the answer. I live in a very mixed neighborhood, but it is really difficult to get people to mix. As an example, I was the only Anglo and Betty, the only Black at the wake of our Hispanic neighbor.

An attempt at gentrification was made by trying to make it the antiques capital of CT, but I don’t think it worked so well. The geography is similar to my town: you have a gentrified or decaying downtown flanked by suburbs that were developed in the 50s and now keep most of the people in them. Most of the economic development is there, and only the rich or the very poor live in the various sections of the downtown.

Where I live, the irony is that it’s the white people who are getting gentrified out. The suburb I live in is seeing most of the houses being sold to asians, who work at the casino and eventually move up to dealer positions. Not all do, but enough have to change the tenor of the suburb over time. Combine that with the lack of decent blue collar jobs, and white flight due to CT’s poor non-casino economy, and probably by 2030 or later my town might become completely different from the way it was.

i’ve witnessed park slope going from an irish-italian ghetto in the ’60’s to the snooty swpl enclave it is today. it ain’t pretty.

in the ’80’s it still had a healthy mix of classes, but once the swpl’s became a critical mass and hijacked the local public school (ps 321 for nyers here) there was no stopping their swift takeover. it was slowed down only by rent stabilization rules that enabled some to hold out. even these will become a vestige, since many are offered cash for their rights to their apartments.

now the sterility of an over-gentrified nabe is manifest. other brooklyn neighborhoods are not too far behind, cobble hill, ft greene, clinton hill.

Has Murray mentioned the role of contraception and abortion in how the civilized gentry regulate their sex and family lives? By all reports he seems to simply represent them as uncomplicated representatives of traditional morality, at least by contrast. But before and after they settle down (late in life, by the old standards) and have their stable, well-educated (and deliberately small) broods, the gentry are as happy to avail themselves of the sexual revolution as anyone else. (I personally don’t find this so horrible, at least in terms of social consequences, but it ought to trouble “cultural conservatives”, i.e. “mores conservatives”).

I’ve lived in Philadelphia for nearly all of the last 37 years. I can’t resist this opening line: Well, some of my best friends live in Fishtown. 😉

Actually, they do. I’ve personally witnessed two gentrification processes, the West Philly “suburb” section immediately west of the U Penn campus, and my current residence of 25 years being the section of South Philly immediately outside of Center City (still called the Graduate Hospital area, even though Penn now has a rehab center there); and I’m privy to eye-witness/participant accounts in two more, Northern Liberties and Fishtown.

Rod’s attempt to analogize Murray’s ideas has merit, though I must observe one, singularly important disconnect: Income level is routinely used as a cultural boundary (and barrier). Murray is doing so quite emphatically. Gentrifiers are not doing their thing to “raise up” the local rubes, they are the opening invasion of a conquest to remake the area into their own images.

My own experience is certainly anecdotal, but I put high value on the lessons I’ve learned. My new neighbors 25 years ago were nearly all stable, African-American, lower-income homeowners. My block had exactly one rental on it (we rehabbed the penultimate one back to a single-family dwelling). The field of the rec center across the street was covered with blacktop, the basketball court was the smoking lounge for local drug lords, and their turf was just three blocks south of us (Washington Ave.). Today, that field is a manicured and well-maitained youth baseball field in constant use from May to November, local corporations sponsor basketball tourneys on the court, and the rec center’s pool is one of the few in the city to have remained open every summer despite budget cuts. There is not one lower-income resident owner left, at least three (that I know of) houses are rentals, the drug lords are long gone and the racial mixture is skewed to white professionals.

Oh, and the property value average has quintupled.

For those interested, the rec center is named for Marian Anderson, whose childhood church is three blocks from my front door. That culture was at worst slumbering when we arrived, though still viable, and now is almost completely gone. I didn’t intend it that way, but I was part of that invasion. 🙁

I have an older vision than Murray’s. Working class people are not inherently anti-intellectual, and wealthy people do not necessarily have much advanced thinking going on upstairs. It may be hard to remember that when Upton Sinclair proposed to organize an “Intercollegiate Socialist Society,” Ivy League deans considered this akin to proposing a “Royal Communist League.” College students weren’t manning picket lines (while the woikers sat home watching TV), they were recruited as scabs to have a good romp clubbing real flesh-and-blood striking workers. There was a time when every cabin in mining camps in the Rockies had a substantial library of classical literature, when working class men read Charles Dickens. But that was when the labor movement was a movement, and the Western Federation of Miners was a community.

My father taught chemistry and I grew up in some very nice working class neighborhoods. That is, my playmates fathers worked in paper mills, the wire works, or were brick masons, truck drivers, home heating repair business owners. They made more money than my father did — because they had good UNION jobs, or, relied on people WITH good union paychecks to patronize their businesses.

The real problem is the way people like Murray sit on high and patronizingly sort people out into neat little categories, then pronounce what’s wrong with the categories. Maybe there is something wrong with the thought process that created the categories in the first place. The most annoying thing Rod Dreher does is occasionally lend credence to such nonsense, along with such pathetic stereotypes as SWPL and MTD. This too shall pass.

In Washington DC, white gentrification not only has uprooted blacks from long-black neighborhoods, it has annihilated black business districts like the one on H Street NE. A couple score white businesses- trendy bars, restaurants and the like- escalated the rents in those parts. Black establishments could no longer afford to stay open. Blacks intensely dislike gentrification and have no wish to learn from or be absorbed by the white gentrifiers.

In D.C. gentrification has improved D.C. at the expense of Maryland. It seems that most of the criminal activity from the District has been driven into Maryland – primarily Prince George’s County. So, in the long run, does gentrification solve anything, or just move problems around?

Seriously, he wants upper-class whites to be secure in their bourgeois values, and to move in to working-class areas to educate the natives by setting a good example…

That’s Murray’s book’s whole thesis. The upper-class white values are clearly functional. They get and stay married, do not have kids outside of marriage, and are generally responsible in their behavior. It is the working/underclass values that are clearly dysfunctional: shy-high rate of kids outside of marriage and generally irresponsible behavior.

However, I agree with you that the working class white are probably not eager to emulate the upper-class white values. So, Murray’s “solution” is a non-starter.